Spiritual leader and bestselling author John Philip Newell is all smiles.

“Well, for one thing, I woke up this morning, opened my eyes, and took a breath,” he chuckles via a Zoom call with Celtic Life International. “So, there is that to be grateful for.”

“Gratitude is essential,” he continues. “An appreciation for who we are and the world around us can be infectious. Attitude is vital also, especially today when everything seems so dark and despaired.”

A ‘wandering teacher’ with ‘the heart of a Celtic bard and the mind of a Celtic scholar’, Newell believes that much of that despondency comes from the decline of formalized religion over the last two centuries.

“In a place like Scotland – and Scotland is not that unlike most other Western countries, we are in a state of seismic collapse of religion as we have traditionally known it – certainly, beyond what I imagined the speed of the decline would be. And while religion is in this enormous and rapid collapse, I continue to believe that the real essence of our religious inheritance can find new form – a resurrection, if you will. And I don’t mean resuscitation – like making Christianity great again or trying to hang onto what was – but rather a new vision for Christianity.”

He believes that when something dies it is human nature to look out for the next thing.

“One of the metaphors that (psychoanalyst) Carl Jung uses to describe religion is that it is like trying to take a photograph of a flowing river. We see the still image and say, “that’s God” – instead seeing that the flow is going to change course in ways that we don’t know anything about. So, as a species, are we prepared to dive into the flow and know the divine deep within us? Do we know that we can’t systematize it?

“I continue to believe that there can be a resurrection of the essential vision of any great religion. In the case of Christianity, that essential vision, or the heart of the vision, is about love – about loving one another. It’s about loving our true essence and it’s about loving every life form.”

Despite the many signs of spiritual awakening, Newell notes that there are still rude awakenings to overcome.

“Within our cultures, religions, and political systems, fundamentalism always rears its ugly head, especially during times of great transition and change. We saw it in the 19th century, in the wake of evolutionary thought and higher literary criticism. And, in response, fundamentalism within Christianity, and Biblical literalism, came to the fore like it had never done before. So, while our political, cultural, and religious systems may get all the headlines these days, I believe that it is because it is a reaction to something deeper within us is trying to be born. We are waking up in every great discipline of thought. We are waking up to the reality that our well-being is absolutely tied to Earth – that our well-being is interrelated, and that one part cannot be well if the whole is neglected. Interestingly, (modern philosopher) Thomas Berry spoke of this moment as being one of grace, meaning that we are seeing the interrelatedness of all things like we’ve never done before.”

“That said,” he continues, “we are still very much in-between who we were and who we are meant to be. The good thing about confusion is that it means there is something that we are about to learn.”

The new book, he says, was born from his desire to connect with others.

“My experience with individuals, groups, and pilgrims across the Western world is that this is a time of tremendous searching. And because many of us are sensing in our souls that something new – something so challenging to how we have lived, how we have compartmentalized one another as nations, religions, and peoples – something much deeper than that is trying to come forth. Thus, many of us are in exile from our religious inheritance because, for the most part, our religious traditions are not nurturing that sense of earth connection or interrelatedness.”

Newell notes that, as a species, we are “recovering” a deeper “knowing” of our truest nature.

“So many of us have been reared in a society, in a religion, that has had a hierarchy of truth in which we’ve been given the impression that we are essentially ignorant, and we need to be told what to do, or we need to be told that certain propositional statements about the divine are true, and I think many of us are knowing a profound liberation from that system of hierarchical truth.

“On the other hand, precisely because the old hierarchy is collapsing, a hierarchy of truth, there’s a shadow side that says, ‘I know what is true. You don’t have to tell me.’ We see that coming to the fore politically in a country like America at the moment. Anything that one doesn’t like, one can say, ‘that’s fake news.’ In this time of transition, we are in a very vulnerable place. To reidentify the authority of the soul is a liberating thing, but also challenging…”

“We need one another in that quest for a new sense of inner authority. And it is not just a matter of subjectively going for whatever is convenient to one’s own success or well-being. A deep inner authority of soul interwoven with the sense of interrelatedness is going to be the way forward.”

So how do we nurture ourselves, and thus one another?

“The world of authority is crumbling. The thing is, they have often appealed to reason, and to scientific knowing – both of which are ways of knowing; to access our capacity for reason and to scientifically know. However, that is to neglect the whole realm of the intuitive and the imaginative. Artists, musicians, and dancers are much more in tune with an intuitive, imaginative source of knowing. We have often treated the realm of the imagination almost as if it is fantasy, as if the imagination takes us away from reality. But I believe the imagination is a faculty that can take us more deeply into reality. Think of a great scientist like Einstein. His theory of relativity, it came from the imagination, and then it has only been, in a sense, scientifically proven to be a theory that we should stand by. But here is sort of a leap forward in a sense, into seeing the interrelatedness and relativity of all things, and it was essentially an intuitive and imaginative leap. I think similarly, we’re being invited to imagine a new way of being and living – a way that, hopefully, will put a smile on everyone’s face.”

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